The Sunday (Dec. 1) fourth-season premiere returned “Treme” to HBO’s schedule for its five-episode premiere. If still unwatched on your DVR or as-yet unconsumed by pirated download, stop reading. This post contains spoilers and links to lots and lots of spoilers for the Sunday final-season premiere of “Treme.”

But first, like “The Wire” before it, “Treme” has been built for the long tail. To that end, HBO Home Entertainment on Monday (Dec. 2) will announce release dates for the season-four and complete-series disc box sets.

The details:

Both boxes will be released Jan. 28, 2014.

“Treme: The Complete Fourth Season” will retail for $49.99 (Blu-ray) and $39.98 (DVD) and will also be available via digital download.

“Treme: The Complete Series” will be Blue-ray only, according to a HBO Home Entertainment news release, and retail for $134.99.

The big “extra” in the complete series box: A stand-alone disc with a dozen-plus full-song music performances from the series (all of which have previously been available via digital download), including the magical “The Greatest Love” duet by Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint.

HBO’s “Treme” was an unlikely proposition from the start. It was predicated on a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, that happened five years before the show started, and that lag has always been awkward. The meticulous re-creation of not quite recent outrages — perpetrated by politicians no longer in office and cops already indicted — has made the show seem to be in a weird time warp all its own.

"Treme" will one day be appreciated by someone for its many virtues, though probably as a show to binge on. The series' virtues do, in fact, materialize after long immersion. But for now, only five episodes are left.

Simon set the creative bar extraordinarily high for himself with “The Wire” and “Generation Kill,” and HBO has provided him and his collaborators the latitude to continue to do so.

Occasionally beautiful and emotional, but also bleak and frustrating, “Treme” certainly hasn’t sullied that reputation. Yet despite the writer’s contention that it’s his best show, for all but those few who savored every note, this rumination on a beleaguered The Big Easy doesn’t belong in the august company of those earlier gems.

If you haven’t gotten into HBO’s Treme by now, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s never going to happen. And that’s OK — Treme is clearly a show that, right from the start, was meant to appeal primarily to people who live in New Orleans and those who may not live there but are fascinated by a beleaguered city that remains a cultural touchstone throughout the world.

The rap against Treme has always been that it’s more concerned with authenticity than it is telling a story. The characters lecture others — and, by extension, the audience — about the true meaning of New Orleans or jazz, and that’s essentially the sum of the show’s conflict. Hailing from David Simon, creator of The Wire, this has always stuck in lots of critics and viewers’ craws. Shouldn’t there be more happening? Shouldn’t the show be bigger, or have more of an epic sweep?

Yet, those looking for a slow-building march toward some sort of catharsis from Treme — those looking for it to be The Wire in New Orleans, in other words — have always been barking up the wrong tree.

Still, there is much to enjoy in “Treme’s” protracted goodbye. It is, as always, beautifully filmed and patiently assembled. Everyone in it clearly believes in the project (and the city) down to their bones, even if the writers have shortchanged their best actors this time. What comes through most is a feeling of over-indulgence — one drink too many, one plate of etouffee too far, one too many hangovers and five too many episodes of an otherwise memorable series.

Simon's shows — this, "The Wire," "Generation Kill," "The Corner" — have always tried to balance the dramatic with the didactic. He understands that if he want to get the viewers to devour the ideological broccoli he's serving about the War on Drugs, the invasion of Iraq, political mismanagement of Katrina, etc., he has to first entice them with something tastier. With "The Wire," it was the cat-and-mouse structure of a police investigation and a wide array of enormously colorful characters. With "Tremé," it's the characters, the music and the incredibly detailed sense of atmosphere. And though he and Overmyer could have turned this mini-season into one final lesson about how messed-up things are in this treasure of an American city(*), they ultimately sided with the reason the select few of us came to, and stayed with, this beautiful but idiosyncratic series: the characters, and their stories.

But just because Treme resists cheap and easy notions of closure doesn't mean its characters and setting aren't going somewhere. Tonight's kickoff episode is set on the day of President Obama's inauguration. It'll make some viewers nostalgic for that brief window when it seemed as though anything was possible, including a fresh start coupled with a mission to address old grievances and fix old mistakes. The show's looking at that period in hindsight, of course, so even as it lets its characters enjoy a momentary rush of optimism at the prospect of starting over, it's still got that melancholy David Simon undertow — that "been there, done that, won't get fooled again" feeling. The show is skeptical of pretty much every major character's grand bid for self-actualization or self-improvement because it knows how politics and economics and human frailty can get between us and whatever our goals are.

“Treme” will always have a special place in Simon’s heart, he said, because it is the last work he did with his friend since college, writer-producer David Mills, who died of an aneurysm while filming in New Orleans.

“I think I’ll always hold a particular connection to New Orleans with David, because he moved down there, he fell in love with the project, and it was the last and some of best work we did together,” Simon said. “I miss him a lot. Just about every day I think of him. He was a good man.”

Despite the burdens of a season half the size of a traditional one (and they received an 11-episode order for season 2) and steep cuts to staff and crew, the people remaining at Treme manage to go out well with few signs on the screen of the behind-the-scenes austerity measures imposed upon them in order to complete the story they never intended to run past four seasons.

Q: Although you’re playing a fictional character, it’s an archetype of New Orleans, a musician. You must have fantasized about being a musician at some point in your life.

A: To be a little boy growing up in New Orleans at some point in your life, you always fantasize about being a musician. I was a trumpet player at Osborne Elementary School for two weeks before I had to turn in my trumpet because I wasn’t that good at it. I also went to school with Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Donald Harrison, Harry Connick Jr. and Kent Jordan and all of those guys, so I was around some of the best musicians in the world. Even as they were studying back then as teenagers, I knew what they were doing. So now as an actor I get to explore all those different worlds I had an interest in. When this opportunity came up, I was floored, because I knew this would be my chance to be the musician I always wanted to be. To be a New Orleans musician is one of the greatest honors in the world. It’s truly, truly a blessing.

Treme, which depicts post-flood New Orleans largely through the lens of its music culture, firmly roots itself in an anti-tourist vision of New Orleans. Created by Maryland native David Simon and Seattle native Eric Overmyer, the show hasn't unpacked the received cultural stereotypes of the city so much as fine-tuned those stereotypes through compulsive attention to documentary detail. Treme's dedicates itself so totally to showcasing unique local color at the micro-level that it transforms New Orleans into a weirdly hermetic dreamland—a gritty, self-celebratory refuge from the dull forces of mass culture, where characters walk around saying things like, "Po'boys aren't sandwiches, they're a way of life!" and "Where else could we ever live, huh?"

Though the producers had half a season to work with, the script by Simon, Overmyer and Pelecanos doesn't suddenly start speeding things up. It's the same leisurely show it's always been, taking time for delightful but plotless scenes like Davis and his buddy going nuts listening to Trombone Shorty's "Hurricane Season" in Davis' car. And though there are no new characters for the final season, there's time for new connections, like the improbable new friendship between Davis and Nelson, and the way that in turn brings Nelson into the orbit of Antoine (which is funny if you remember Nelson and Desiree's interaction last season).

As this show rolls toward the exit, it becomes increasingly clear that Alexander’s character in particular, with her tired beauty and stubborn resilience, is meant to be the physical embodiment of the city itself. Treme and New Orleans really have a lot in common: They’re both off-beat, engaging, full of heart and heat, and very, very, special—especially when, as in these last few episodes, they have the self-restraint (and self-confidence) to refrain from telling you how special they are.

Same as it ever was, and same with Treme. This premiere isn't going to convince a non-watcher that it's the best show on television, but those who already enjoy it are going to settle in with old friends and see what's been going on since we last came together. I'm noticing the micro-scenes that Edward Copeland wrote about, and even though I'm more forgiving than some, I'm starting to get tired of certain repetitive story lines, like Annie's. But I do want to see what happens with Antoine and Albert, as well as LaDonna and Janette. And remembering what it's like to hear Shorty's "supafunkrock" for the first time along with Davis, well, that's all right.

As has been the case throughout Treme’s run, Pierce’s portrayal of Antoine remains the series’ heart and soul. Pierce finds new ways to make Antoine funny and serious, often simultaneously, and reveals new sides to Batiste each season. The show manages to give most members of its ensemble cast moments to shine, but I can’t remember a wasted moment involving Pierce.

So begins our last leg of the journey down the never-end road but life is not television and everyone from David Simon down to lowly bloggers knows we have reached the end times and not with a bang but with what I expect many critics will find a whimper. There was not a lot of drama in this episode, no one hollering in the spirit, no one falling out. It was a quiet transition to the final episode but that is a fair reflection of where we stood by the election of 2008: trying to settle back into something like normality.